Contributor(s): Tim Harford | Join us for this online public event with Tim Harford on the day his new book, How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers, is published.

When was the last time you read a grand statement, accompanied by a large number, and wondered whether it could really be true? Statistics are vital in helping us tell stories – we see them in the papers, on social media, and we hear them used in everyday conversation – and yet we doubt them more than ever.But numbers – in the right hands – have the power to change the world for the better. Contrary to popular belief, good statistics are not a trick, although they are a kind of magic. Good statistics are not smoke and mirrors; in fact, they help us see more clearly. Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope for a bacteriologist, or an X-ray for a radiologist. If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world around us and about ourselves – both large and small – that we would not be able to see in any other way.

In How to Make the World Add Up, Tim Harford draws on his experience as both an economist and presenter of the BBC’s radio show More or Less. He takes us deep into the world of disinformation and obfuscation, bad research and misplaced motivation to find those priceless jewels of data and analysis.

Tim Harford (@TimHarford) is a senior columnist for the Financial Times and the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less. Hew as awarded the OBE ‘For Services to Improving Economic Understanding’ in 2019. He was the winner of the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism in 2006, and More or Less was commended for excellence in journalism by the Royal Statistical Society in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Harford lives in Oxford with his wife and three children, and is a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. His other books include The Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy, The Next Fifty Things that Made the Modern Economy, Messy, The Undercover Economist, The Logic of Life and Adapt.

You can order the book, How to Make the World Add Up, (UK delivery only) from our official LSE Events independent book shop, Pages of Hackney.

Irini Moustaki (@MoustakiIrini) is Professor of Social Statistics at LSE. Her research interests are in the areas of latent variable models and structural equation models and her methodological work includes treatment of missing data, longitudinal data, detection of outliers, goodness-of-fit tests and advanced estimation methods. Furthermore, she has made methodological and applied contributions in the areas of comparative cross-national studies and epidemiological studies on rare diseases. She was the Executive Editor of the journal Psychometrika for over four years and she is the President elect of the Psychometric Society.

The Department of Statistics (@StatsDeptLSE) is an international community for the development of statistical methodology, with an illustrious history of contributions to research and teaching in the social sciences.